Hearts!

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by camochef

I've never been fond of heart shaped tomatoes as they usually look spindly as if they're dying and detract from the overall appearance of my gardens. This had nothing to do with taste or production.
Then I discovered WES and decided a couple spindly looking plants were tolerable for such a great tasting tomato.
Then last year I planted some of my Kukla's Portugese Bullsheart seed that I had received from Jackie a couple years earlier. Move over Wes! Kukla's Portugese Bulls Heart is the best tasting heart shaped tomato I ever grew!
It is an end of the season producer and really puts out a decent crop while other varieties are beginning to wain in production. And to think, I almost pulled it earlier in the season as it just wasn't producing much. If you like hearts I recommend trying it, just be patient with it as it will please in the end!
Enjoy!
camo

M ( camo), you and I differ b'c the feathery drooping foliage of most heart varieties doesn't bother me at all, and they don't detract from my tomato garden at all, which actually is a small part of my larger garden which is mainly perennials. I grow varieties primarily for taste, not what they look like folaige-wise.

For me Wes does not have droopy wispy foliage and there are other hearts that don't either.

HEre's Tania's page for Wes and no one who reported there indicated wispy droopy foliage.

http://t.tatianastomatobase.com:88/wiki/Wes

Readin that page it reminded me that I got seeds for Wes many years ago from Robert Richardson, now deceased, who was from England and a wonderful man he was, but his main interest was hot peppers and I got some great ones from him and two are still offered at SESE.

I offered all three Kukla's in my recent seed offer here, the beef, the heart and the paste, seeds all from Jackie as well, but some of her seeds were crossed so for a few of them she resent. And there's still some pink ones appearing for the paste, so I warned folks here to save seeds only from red fruited plants b/c it should be red.

For the heart, which is red, she called it Kukla's Portuguese Heart, not Bulls heart so I called it heart, and not bullsheart as well. I agree it's a good one, but my fave of the three is Kukla's Portuguese Beefsteak, which is PL and huge fruits and outstanding taste.

I can't rememebr which of the Kukla's I sent to Linda at TGS, but have in front of me the list of the ones I sent to Adam Gleckler which were the beef and the heart and I sent the same to Glenn Drowns at Sandhill. And I think I sent seeds of some of them to Reinhard Kraft in Germany b'c we've been going back and forth on seeds for many years now.

The reason my memory is no longer perfect, ahem, is b'c I don't know where my other 2012 data book is right now, except I know it's in my home somewhere.

As far as I know none of the three are available commercially yet, but that should change after this summer. I did distribute quite a bit of seed for all three in my recent Jan seed offer and actually ran out of seed for two of them, so hopefully those folks will also offer some of them here in the Fall.

As always, I hope that folks will buy maybe half of their tomato seeds from the several family run sites that so many folks are dependent on for really interesting varieties. And in these economic times IMO they deserve all the support that tomato growers can give them.

As for my tomato garden it's a mess. Freda, who does all my gardening for me has not been able to be here to do much at all in terms of the tomatoes as well as all the expensive replacement perennials I ordered and I can see that I've lost a lot of them.

I don't even know which varieties survived b'c there's been some serious woodchuck "pruning" of quite a few of them and as usual, almsot ALL of them are varieties that will be new to all or most. But major seed production is done by three others, Shoe and Lee in NC and Neil in IL, where they are in a very serious drought situation right now.

OK, gotta go, I can hear the TV back here and someone is beating someone else, as in tennis from Wimbledon.